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OBSCURANTISM IN MODERN 
 SCIENCE 
 
 " The great thing to remember is that the mind of man cannot 
 be enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some 
 particular set of superstitions. There is an infinite supply of other 
 superstitions always at hand ; and the mind that desires such things 
 that is, the mind that has not trained itself to the hard discipline of 
 reasonableness and honesty, will, as soon as its devils are cast out, 
 proceed to fill itself with their relations." 
 
 GILBERT MURRAY, Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. in. 
 
 UNDER the aegis of an Institution called the North 
 London Christian Evidence League, there was published 
 recently a collection of letters from experts in various 
 branches of science which were answers to inquiries 
 made by the League as to the attitude of these eminent 
 persons towards orthodox beliefs. 1 The eagerness with 
 which the editor construes the vague replies of some of 
 the questioned into endorsement of current dogmas says 
 more for his shrewdness than for his candour, while the 
 state of mind which believes that the validity of any 
 creed can be settled by a referendum betrays a lack of 
 humour and of sense of proportion. What value can 
 there be in assent to a body of alleged facts to which no 
 tests are applicable ; to statements which can never be 
 submitted to the ordinary canons of evidence ; statements 
 contained in ancient documents which are products of 
 an age when the unusual was explained (if things were 
 
 1 Religious Beliefs of Scientists. By A. H. Tabrum. (Hunter and 
 Longhurst, London.) 
 
 285506 
 
2 "' 'C'BS~URAN&SM : I;\> .MODERN SCIENCE 
 
 explained at all, which is doubtful) as a supernatural 
 event ? Moreover, when assent to these reported occur- 
 rences is obtained, what bearing has that on the conduct 
 of life? What relation is there between the dogma of 
 the Trinity and moral codes? As Mr. Sturt says in his 
 Idea of a Free Church : " Historical evidence could never 
 do more than predispose a man to try how a suggested 
 religion works in practice. It is by practice that religions 
 / are validated or discredited. Christianity is not a system 
 of evidence ; it is primarily a way of looking at life " 
 
 (p- 85). 
 
 The tenacity with which the Church clung to dogmas 
 now discredited as, for example, the vicarious theory of 
 the Atonement, and physical torture in an eternal hell 
 reasserts itself as the dogmas that remain entrenched in 
 the citadel of the supernatural are challenged. In the 
 degree that men of high intelligence affirm their adher- 
 ence to those dogmas, comfort comes to those who sit 
 in uneasy chairs in Zion. Authority determines the 
 opinions of most of us ; in the domain of Science legiti- 
 mately so, because we have the consensus of the well- 
 informed and the means of testing for ourselves the 
 evidence on which their dicta are based ; but in the 
 domain of Theology illegitimately, because the autho- 
 rities are not in accord, and because no means of 
 testing the data on which their dicta are based are pro- 
 ducible. But the multitude do not discriminate ; they 
 assume that the man who can speak with unchallenged 
 authority on the subject of which he is a master is 
 entitled to speak with like authority on everything else. 
 Some satirist has said " that mere denial of the existence 
 of God does not qualify a man to be heard on matters of 
 higher importance," and it may be said conversely that 
 mere assertion of belief in a Creative Power and Ultimate 
 Purpose in the Universe cannot carry more weight 
 because the assertor has made important discoveries in 
 physical science. 
 
OBSCURANTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 3 
 
 There can be little doubt that the more confident tone 
 adopted by recent defenders of the remnants of "the 
 faith once delivered to the saints " has its explanation in 
 a reaction which has set in against the too dogmatic 
 spirit which, a couple of generations ago, pervaded 
 certain scientific deliverances in the enthusiasm begotten 
 by discoveries whose effect on men's attitude towards 
 phenomena was one of revolution. " Old things passed 
 away, all things became new." But to make discoveries 
 of the causes of the origin of species and of the funda- 
 mental identity of the matter of the universe, the bases 
 of assumptions that only minor problems awaited solu- 
 tions, is to forget what manner of spirit we are of. As 
 ^ M. Duclaux has finely said : " It is because science is 
 sure of nothing that it is always advancing." We may 
 add that in the degree that theology is sure of anything, 
 stagnation is its doom. 
 
 The reaction to which reference has just been made 
 has led minds in whom the wish to believe is greater 
 than the desire to know to seize the more eagerly upon 
 certain deliverances of men eminent in science, the 
 apparent effect of which is to buttress the shaken 
 structure of orthodox beliefs. As illustrating this, in 
 his day the well-nigh forgotten Sir Richard Owen 
 secured the benison of entirely-forgotten bishops because 
 of his contention against Huxley that a certain lobe in 
 the human brain, known as the hippocampus minor, is 
 lacking in the brain of anthropoid apes. Owen was 
 proved to be in the wrong, but the great weight of his 
 authority as a comparative anatomist retarded, and in 
 some measure still retards, acceptance of the fact that the 
 differences between man and ape are differences of degree 
 and not of kind. 
 
 Again, as recently as 1903 a lively controversy arose 
 in the Times out of a statement by the late Lord Kelvin 
 that " modern biologists were coming to a firm accept- 
 ance of a vital principle," and that ^a fortuitous con- 
 
4 OBSCURANTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 
 
 course of atoms may result in the formation of a crystal, 
 but when we come to living matter scientific thought is 
 compelled to accept the idea of Creative Power." 1 The 
 Times, in a leader on this letter, called this " a weighty 
 contribution to the formation of just opinion on the 
 subject " ; whereupon, with a logic wholly lacking in that 
 deliverance, Sir Thiselton Dyer contended that while in 
 the domain of physics he would be a bold man who dare 
 cross swords with Lord Kelvin, "for dogmatic utterance 
 on biological questions there is no reason to suppose 
 that he is better equipped than any person of average 
 intelligence." 2 Then a waft of fresh air was imported 
 by Sir Ray Lankester in his declaration that " the whole 
 order of nature, including living and non-living matter, 
 is a network of mechanism the main features of which 
 have been made more or less obvious to the wondering 
 intelligence of mankind by the labour and ingenuity of 
 scientific investigators. But no sane 
 
 f,hat w< " TflP Irnnw, or e ygr ran hope : to know. 
 
 _or conceive of the possibility of knowing whence this 
 mechanism has come, why it is there, whifh ?r i> lg 
 going, and what there may or may not be beyond and 
 beside it which pur senses are inrapable of appreciating 
 These things are not explained by ' science,' and never 
 can be." 3 And, it may be added, the theology which 
 explains them has yet to be discovered. 
 
 Much to the same effect had been said before by 
 Huxley and Tyndall, and men of lesser calibre, and 
 much to the same effect has been said since ; but in 
 some influential quarters this confession of nescience is 
 qualified by assumptions of knowledge as to a meaning 
 and purpose at the core of things. As prominent 
 examples of this we may take Sir Oliver Lodge and 
 Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, whose re-affirmance of such 
 assumptions constitutes the main purpose of their most 
 
 1 Letter to the Times, May 4, 1903. 
 
 2 Times, May 7, 1903. 3 Times, May 19, 1903. 
 
OBSCURANTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 5 
 
 recent books Sir Oliver's Reason and Belief (Methuen 
 and Co.) and Dr. Wallace's World of Life (Chapman and 
 Hall). 
 
 Dr. Wallace, whose mental agility in his ninetieth 
 year is an answer to every counsel of despair that would 
 slacken energy, gives us what, practically, is his last will 
 and testament, because, he tells us, it is his " summary 
 and completion of a half-century of thought and labour 
 on the Darwinian theory of evolution." 1 The body of 
 facts therein has led him to the conclusion that there is, 
 41 first, a Creative Power which so constituted matter as 
 to render these marvels possible ; next, a directive Mind, 
 which is demanded at every step of what we term 
 growth ; and, lastly, an ultimate Purpose in the very 
 existence of the whole vast life-world in all its long 
 course of evolution throughout the aeons of geological 
 time. This Purpose, which alone throws light on many 
 of the mysteries of its mode of evolution, I hold to be 
 the development of Man, the one crowning product of 
 
 the whole cosmic process of life-development the 
 
 only being who can appreciate the hidden forces and 
 motions everywhere at work, and can deduce from them 
 a supreme and overruling Mind as their necessary 
 cause." Further on Dr. Wallace asserts that "the 
 special purpose of this world of ours is the development 
 
 of mankind for an enduring spiritual existence for 
 
 which the whole object of our earth life is a preparation " 
 (Preface, p. vii). 
 
 With this quotation should be linked the argument 
 with which Dr. Wallace's treatise on Darwinism (pub- 
 lished in 1889) concludes namely, "that there were at 
 least three stages in the development of the organic 
 world when some new cause or power must necessarily 
 have come into action. The first stage is the change 
 from the inorganic to organic ; the next stage the 
 
 1 Preface, p. v. 
 
6 OBSCURANTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 
 
 introduction of sensation or consciousness, constituting- 
 the fundamental distinction between the animal and 
 vegetable kingdom. The third stage is the existence in 
 man of a number of his most characteristic and noblest 
 faculties, those which raise him furthest above the brutes 
 and open up possibilities of almost indefinite advance- 
 ment " (pp. 474-75). 
 
 In his Riddles of the Sphinx Dr. Schiller remarks 
 that " A matter of fact is something which must be faced, 
 even though it may be unpleasant to do so, whereas a 
 matter of opinion may be manipulated so as to suit the 
 exigencies of every occasion " (p. 364). And the 
 difficulty in dealing with the thesis laid down by Dr. 
 Wallace is that there are in it no facts to be faced, only 
 a series of assumptions in support of which not a shred 
 of evidence that can be sifted is offered. It would seem 
 sufficient to say, in refutation of these assumptions, that 
 their acceptance would be destructive of the entire theory 
 of the processes of evolution which an ever-growing- 
 body of facts proves that, if they operate anywhere, they 
 operate everywhere. Heedless of this, Dr. Wallace 
 advances, in explanation of those processes, a theory 
 that the " organizing mind need not be infinite in its 
 attributes," 1 or " not necessarily what we may ignorantly 
 mean by * omnipotent' or 'benevolent' in our mis- 
 interpretation of what we see around us." 2 He spurns 
 the apparently gratuitous creation by theologians of a 
 hierarchy of angels and archangels with no defined 
 duties but that of attendants and messengers of the 
 Deity, 3 and, no doubt, willingly hands over explanation 
 of the belief in these winged animals to the comparative 
 
 1 P. 392. 2 P. 399- 
 
 3 " Preaching- at St. Paul's, Harringay, the Bishop of London argued 
 that God and the angels were always near us " (Daily Chronicle, 
 November 6, 1911). There was published in December, 1911, A Study 
 of Angels, by the Rev. J. H. Svvinstead (Hodder and Stoughton), to 
 which Lord Halsbury contributes an Introduction. Probably both 
 prelate and jurist will be cited as authorities on the subject. 
 
OBSCURANTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 7 
 
 mythologists. But this is only to replace them by the 
 hypothesis that there is "an almost infinite series of 
 grades of beings having higher and higher powers in 
 regard to the origination, the development, and the 
 control of the Universe," "some of them creating by 
 their will-power the primal universe of ether," and others 
 "so acting upon it as to develop from it, in suitable 
 masses and at suitable distances," 1 the various elements of 
 matter from which nebulas and suns are formed ! Hypo- 
 theses have their value, as the history of advance in science 
 testifies ; but they must be of the workable order, and 
 where can place or warrant be found for this resuscitation 
 of animistic beliefs? The functions of this heavenly 
 host, as defined by Dr. Wallace, appear to be only 
 physical, the deity reserving to himself the moral 
 government of the universe, a government which 
 Dr. Wallace contends is wholly beneficent. He argues 
 that there is no cruelty in Nature ; "the whole system 
 \ of life-development is that of providing food for the 
 higher," and the pain which is a fundamental condition 
 of that system is not maleficent, but protective. In the 
 lowest organisms, where the rudiments of sensation are 
 present, it is practically absent, and the revolt of the 
 humane at the spectacle of animals suffering arises from 
 " our whole tendency to transfer our sensations of pain 
 to them." 2 The action of a directive purpose meets us 
 everywhere ; it is evident, for example, in the myriad 
 swarms of mosquitoes, because these supply food for birds, 
 and thus indirectly minister to the existence of song and 
 plumage whereby the ear and eye of man are gratified ! 
 Dr. Wallace does not explain what beneficent purpose 
 lies in the multiplication of blood-parasites that slay 
 their thousands by the appalling " sleeping-sickness " 
 whose venomous causes man is striving to extinguish ; 
 or in the Californian poison-vine which, when brushed 
 
 1 P. 393- 2 P. 377- 
 
8 OBSCURANTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 
 
 against, produces eczema over the whole body ; or in 
 the macuna bean of Zambesia, whose trodden-on spines 
 revenge the assault by exuding a powder so skin- 
 maddening that the tortured natives will jump into a 
 crocodile-haunted river to relieve the agony. His 
 teleology is a reversion to the smug lessons of our 
 boyhood when " the soul of good in things evil " was 
 expounded in the namby-pamby literature of such books 
 as Workers without Wage, of the contents of which this 
 is a sample : 
 
 Q.: Is there any use in the gadfly and his like? 
 
 A.: Yes ; they have a use in making wild cattle move 
 from spot to spot, and in preventing the flocks and herds 
 from growing too indolent. 
 
 The purposeful involves the ethical, and the ethical is 
 a purely human product. Neither good nor evil can be 
 imputed to Nature ; hers is the sphere of unbroken 
 sequence which man can oppose only to fail in the 
 attempt. And the optimism of Dr. Wallace has 
 dignified retort in the lines in which Thomas Hardy 
 addresses a deity whom he pictures as reviewing his 
 government of things at a year's end : 
 
 And what's the good of it, I said, 
 What purpose made you call 
 From formless void this Earth I tread, 
 When nine and ninety could be said 
 Why nought should be at all ? 
 
 Yea, Sire, why shaped you us, " who in 
 
 This tabernacle groan ? " 
 
 If ever a joy be found therein, 
 
 Such joy no man had wished to win, 
 
 If he had never known ! r 
 
 " Bigness is not greatness, "as Emerson says, but one 
 would presumably expect the "Creative Power" to 
 
 1 Fortnightly Review, January, 1907. 
 
OBSCURANTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 9 
 
 exhibit some sense of proportion. And we may well 
 assume absence of that saving grace if Dr. Wallace can 
 make good his rechauffe of the anthropocentric theory 
 which evolution has traversed, and, as some of us think, 
 demolished. A survey of cosmic development can but 
 suggest the reflection that the purpose which Dr. Wallace 
 sees in the universe might have been achieved by shorter 
 cuts. The justification for the existence of a myriad 
 heavenly bodies and, to make quick descent from these, 
 for the miscellaneous organisms preceding man, the 
 most remote star and the " dragons of the prime " as 
 alike agents of his spiritual evolution, seems far to 
 seek. And if we judge only from the history of 
 these reptilian monsters we see in them a series of 
 unsuccessful experiments ; perchance the " 'prentice 
 hands " of the angelic auxiliaries resulting in the pro- 
 duction of a mass of superfluous unfit to secure the 
 existence of the fit. Pointing to them, Nature can only 
 confess, with Beau Drummers valet when showing to a 
 friend of his master's a heap of discarded ties, " These 
 are our failures." 
 
 As for an "enduring spiritual existence," to once 
 more quote Dr. Schiller : " The end and origin of the 
 soul are alike shrouded in perplexities which religious 
 
 dogma makes serious attempt to dispel Whence does 
 
 the soul come? Does it exist before the body, is it 
 derived from the souls or the bodies of its parents, or 
 created ad hoc by the Deity ? Is Pre-existence, Tradu- 
 cianism, or Creationism the orthodox doctrine? The 
 first theory, although we shall see that it is the only one 
 on which any rational eschatology can be, or has been, 
 -based, is difficult, and has not figured largely in religious 
 thought ; but the other two are alike impossible and 
 offensive. Indeed, it would be difficult to decide which 
 supposition was more offensive, whether that the manu- 
 facture of immortal spirits should be a privilege directly 
 delegated to the chance passions of a male and female, 
 
io OBSCURANTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 
 
 or that they should have the power at their pleasure to 
 call forth the creative energy of God." 1 
 
 Can Dr. Wallace tell us at what precise stage in 
 man's development the Creative Power intervened either 
 directly or through his " hosts of angels"? Was the 
 " enduring spiritual existence " conferred on Pithecan- 
 thropus erectus, or postponed till he had become more 
 pronouncedly Homo sapiens; and does Eolithic or 
 Palaeolithic man come under that head? As to the 
 "almost indefinite advancement" which this spiritual 
 endowment was to secure, does the history of mankind, 
 from the dateless Ancient Stone Age to this twentieth 
 century of the Christian era, show that that has been 
 even approximately reached ? It is all very well to point 
 to the altitudes to which a few units among the millions 
 of humankind have attained, but what of the depths in 
 which the myriads have remained ? Is not any tendency 
 to smug satisfaction checked by even the most superficial 
 acquaintance with the story of mankind, with its record 
 of the millions whose existence has been, and millions 
 whose existence to-day remains, less enviable than that 
 of the brutes? of the millions whose eyes were opened 
 only to close on the darkness of death? of the low 
 intellectual, moral, and spiritual plane on which all but 
 an infinitesimal number stand, and the extinguishment 
 of many of these in the fullness of their power and use- 
 fulness ? And so the survey might be extended till we 
 reach the degrading sequel of an " enduring spiritual 
 existence " which makes proof of its survival by raps and 
 knocks, and by the whole bag of tricks of the mediums 
 for whose integrity as claimants of communication with 
 the unseen Dr. Wallace goes bail. For it is in his 
 belief in the validity of the phenomena of spiritualism 
 that the explanation of his theories is found. Take this 
 as culled from many proofs. When summoned as 
 
 1 Riddles of the Sphinx, p. 372. 
 
OBSCURA NTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 1 1 
 
 witness in an action brought by one Archdeacon 
 Colley against Mr. Maskelyne, Dr. Wallace deposed 
 that he saw a white patch appear on the left side of a 
 man's coat and grow into the distinct figure of a woman 
 in flowing drapery, and that he was absolutely certain 
 that this was a spiritual manifestation. x Further, Dr. 
 Wallace, face to face with the exposure of the medium 
 Eusapia Palladino, averred that that detection " in no 
 way got rid of the genuine phenomena previously 
 witnessed." 2 Of this woman's performances the late 
 Mr. Frank Podmore said that the whole of them can be 
 explained by the time-honoured device of substitution of 
 foot or hand. 3 And the end and aim of the World of 
 Life is made obvious in the advice which Dr. Wallace 
 gives therein to his readers to study, " as dealing with 
 the ethics and philosophy of spiritualism," the late 
 Stainton Moses's Spirit Teaching and V. C. Desertes's 
 Psych i-Ph ilosophy. 
 
 Space forbids further criticism of the World of Life, 
 with its limited deity working with assistance in a 
 limited universe for in his Man's Place in the Universe 
 Dr. Wallace contends that the sidereal system is finite 
 and what remains available must be given to Sir 
 Oliver Lodge's Reason and Belief. 
 
 In his Substance of Faith Allied with Science: A 
 Catechism for Parents and Teachers (now in its tenth 
 edition), Sir Oliver gives as his credo, " Belief in one 
 Infinite and Eternal Being ; a guiding and loving 
 Father, in whom all things consist." Further, that " the 
 Divine Nature is specially revealed to man through 
 Jesus Christ our Lord, who lived, taught, and suffered 
 in Palestine 1,900 years ago, and has since been 
 worshipped by the Christian Church as the immortal Son 
 of God, the Saviour of the World." He also believes 
 
 1 Daily Mail, April 27, 1907. 
 
 2 Letter to the Daily Chronicle, January 24, 1896. 
 
 3 The Newer Spiritualism, p. 144. 
 
12 OBSCURANTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 
 
 that " man is privileged to understand and assist the 
 Divine purpose on this earth ; that prayer is a means 
 of communication between man and God, and that the 
 Holy Spirit is ever ready to help us along the way 
 towards Goodness and Truth, so that by unselfish 
 service we may gradually enter into the Life Eternal, 
 the Communion of Saints, and the Peace of God." 
 
 In this we have a slightly eviscerated Apostles' Creed, 
 to which a supplement is given in Reason and Belief. 
 The basis of that book, Sir Oliver submits, is " one of 
 fact." Among the facts is the now unchallengeable 
 one, that of man's ancestry " on his bodily side through 
 the animals, whereby a terrestrial existence was rendered 
 possible for beings at a comparatively advanced stage of 
 spiritual evolution. Plato and Shakespeare and Newton 
 lay then in the womb of the future." Probably Sir 
 Oliver had in his mind Tyndall's famous sentence in 
 which, with a true "scientific use of the imagination," 
 he said that " all our philosophy, poetry, science, and 
 art Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael are 
 potential in the fires of the sun." 
 
 Now for the assumption. "There must have come 
 a time when at a definite stage in the long history the 
 triumphant hymn, ' It is finished ; man is made,' was 
 sung." Whether the vocalists were of the angelic type 
 with which the Gospels, and, with a difference, Dr. 
 Wallace, make us familiar, we are not told ; neither are 
 we helped, in seeking to arrive at the process of the 
 making of man by Sir Oliver's hints at "pre-existence," 
 or at our being "chips of a great mass of mind," 
 individuality being attained in the incarnation of these 
 " spiritual fragments in their several bodies, and thereby 
 
 the permanence of personality secured, for no 
 
 thoughtful person can really and consistently believe 
 that the spirit will not survive the body " (pp. 10-11). 
 In connection with this vague ontology, there follows 
 a chapter on the "Advent of Christ," in whose super- 
 
OBSCURANTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 13 
 
 natural birth Sir Oliver apparently believes. It is often 
 not easy to catch his meaning, the words are elusive ; 
 but he says that to him, as "a student of science/' the 
 " historical testimony in favour of that momentous 
 Christian doctrine the Incarnation is entirely credi- 
 ble." There is a watering-down of the significance of 
 this in his remark, " We are all incarnations, all sons 
 of God in a sense, but," etc. Anyway, the Incarnation 
 was necessary because man, who had hitherto been in 
 a state of innocency, like the animals, having arrived 
 at a stage when he realized that he was free and could 
 "discriminate between good and evil," utilized that 
 power and fell, whereby sin entered into the world. 
 Help has been rendered by men to their fellows ; help, 
 too, " by other beings and in other ways " " I believe 
 this to be literally true " (p. 40) adds Sir Oliver, thus 
 joining hands with Dr. Wallace in his theory of sub- 
 sidiary " powers of the air." Nineteen hundred years 
 ago " the Great Spirit took pity on the human race and 
 sent the Lord from heaven to reveal to us the love, the 
 pity, the long-suffering " of the God whom man had 
 misunderstood. In Memoriam, Wordsworth, and the 
 Gospel according to John are the chief " authorities " 
 cited for this action on the part of the deity. But for 
 the statement, that "while Christ was incarnate he had 
 in some real sense partially forgotten previous exist- 
 ence," Sir Oliver is solely responsible, and what he 
 means is a mystery which he alone can be asked to 
 solve. 1 We are reminded of the undergraduate's con- 
 clusion in an answer about some events in the life of 
 Christ which Grant Duff gives in his inimitable Notes 
 
 1 A parallel obscurity is supplied in Mr. Chapman's Introduction to 
 the Pentateuch (Cambridge University Press, 1911) when commenting 
 on the question whether Jesus, in quoting from those writings, accepted 
 the current belief in their Mosaic authorship. Mr. Chapman suggests 
 that in this and other matters bearing "on Christ's knowledge as Man," 
 "in some manner the Divine Omniscience was held in abeyance, and not 
 translated into the sphere of human action " (p. 304). 
 
14 OBSCURANTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 
 
 from a Diary. "These facts are not recorded in the 
 Gospels, and there is no allusion to them in the Fathers, 
 but they are fully detailed by Dr. Farrar." 
 
 There is only brief space, and certainly small 
 necessity, for reference to the chapters which are 
 designed "to furnish hints and suggestions for the 
 effective treating of the Old Testament in the light of 
 the doctrine of Evolution." 
 
 To Sir Oliver Lodge the miscellaneous writings 
 grouped under that title writings of unknown or 
 disputed authorship and of unsettled date, writings 
 some of which are compilations and redactions of older 
 documents and incorporations of legendary materials 
 from alien sources are to be treated as vehicles of " a 
 progressive revelation, embodying the story of the 
 chosen race from whom Messiah was to be born ": Sir 
 Oliver incidentally remarks that " we, too, are a chosen 
 people," thus bandying terms about until they are 
 emptied of all the old connotation. There is no reason 
 to suspect that Sir Oliver Lodge shares the delusion of 
 certain eccentrics that the British are descendants of 
 the Ten Lost Tribes ; perhaps his remark is but the 
 echo of verses which, like other youths brought up in 
 orthodox beliefs, he may have learned in the Sunday 
 school. 
 
 I thank the goodness and the grace 
 Which on my birth has smiled, 
 And made me, in this Christian land, 
 A happy English child. 
 
 I was not born, as thousands are, 
 Where God is never known, 
 Nor taught to pray a useless prayer 
 To blocks of wood and stone. 
 
 And so on. 
 
 Dealing with the mythology in Genesis, he says that 
 the talk about Jehovah walking in the garden of Eden 
 " is a poetical mode of expression for a reality, for surely 
 
OBSCURA NTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 1 5 
 
 from a beautiful garden the Deity is not absent," and 
 some pretty verses from the' late T. E. Brown are cited in 
 illustration. Sir Oliver does not tell us what " reality " 
 underlaid the sequel when the perambulating deity 
 asked why Adam hid himself, but the whole chapter is 
 more suggestive for what it omits than for what it 
 admits. 
 
 It is impossible even to summarize the facts confuting 
 the theories which in this paper are, necessarily, 
 presented only in briefest outline. But the onus 
 probandi lies on those who advance them. Assump- 
 tions abound, but no shred of proof is offered, both 
 authors exemplifying the shrewd axiom of Montaigne 
 that " nothing is so firmly believed as that which is 
 least known." 
 
 While admitting that the mystery of origins remains, 
 and that many stages in the process are obscure, there 
 is no justification for the conclusion that what is un- 
 solved is explicable only by assuming a deus ex machina 
 acting sporadically and arbitrarily. The cumulative 
 evidence, ever increasing in volume, as to the funda- 
 mental relationship between the inorganic and the 
 organic, thereby witnessing to the unity of the cosmos, 
 is sufficing refutation. The real question at issue 
 raised in both volumes is man's place in the universe, 
 and the assumption that he is its crowning, final 
 product. Those who assign him a special place therein 
 have to reckon with the evidence supplied by compara- 
 tive anatomy and comparative psychology. The one 
 has demonstrated fundamental identity between the 
 apparatus of animals and man ; it has proved " that the 
 structural differences which separate Man from the 
 Gorilla and the Chimpanzee are not so great as those 
 which separate the Gorilla from the lower apes"; 1 and 
 that when the blood of these last-named is mixed with 
 
 1 Huxley's Mart's Place in Nature, p. 103. 
 
16 OBSCURA NTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 
 
 human blood the serum of the one destroys the blood- 
 cells of the other, whereas no such effect arises when 
 the blood of man is mixed with that of the anthropoid 
 apes. z The other has demonstrated identity of behaviour 
 between the higher animals and man, and shown that 
 "the development of mind in its early stages and in 
 certain directions is revealed most adequately in the 
 animal. Its mind exhibits substantially the same pheno- 
 mena which the human mind exhibits in its early stages 
 in the child." 2 
 
 So widely-read a man as Sir Oliver Lodge cannot be 
 ignorant of the success which has attended the application 
 of the comparative method to mythology, theology, and 
 ethics. But not a hint of this is breathed in Reason and 
 Belief. The reader will close that book without an 
 inkling how far legendary elements enter into the 
 historical portions of the Bible, and how scrutiny of the 
 Christian documents has yielded evidence of the import 
 of pagan conceptions. The author of the article 
 " Nativity " in the Encyclopaedia Biblica says of the 
 myth of the Virgin birth that " here we unquestionably 
 enter the circle of pagan ideas, ideas foreign to Judaism," 
 while to such shifts are modern divines of the liberal 
 type of Dr. Sanday put that that scholar, seeking to 
 account for the silence of Mark about the Incarnation, 
 says that " possibly Luke had a special source of 
 information connected with the court of the Herods, 
 perhaps through Joanna, wife of Chuza, the King's 
 steward." 3 Knowledge of so "momentous" an event 
 has for its source a piece of back-stairs gossip ! And 
 travelling backwards to the so-called previsions of a 
 Messiah, on which Sir Oliver lays stress, how will he 
 meet the acute question put by Dr. Reuss in his 
 comment on the oft-quoted and mistranslated verse in 
 
 1 Darwin and Modern Science, p. 129. 
 - Baldwin, Story of the Mind, p. 35. 
 3 Guardian, February 4, 1903. 
 
OBSCURANTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 17 
 
 Isaiah (vii, 14) about the child to be born of a " virgin," 
 " What consolation would Ahaz have had if the Prophet 
 had said to him, ' Do not fear these two kings, because 
 in 750 years the Messiah will be born ' ?"* 
 
 All that research and inquiry, carried on in that 
 scientific spirit which commends itself to one who is a 
 " student of science," have achieved in the foregoing 
 and many other cases has no reference in these inchoate 
 and inconclusive pages. At the end of one of the 
 chapters a brief list of books on Hebrew history is 
 given, but these are of pseudo-liberal type, and the 
 more advanced writings of Canon Cheyne, Driver, and 
 their school are named only to be dismissed as too 
 technical for the public for whom Sir Oliver successfully 
 caters. The Encyclopaedia Biblica is ignored. 
 
 It is the same with Ethics. That these are a product 
 of social evolution, and therefore relative in their 
 standards ; that sin is, in its essence, an anti-social 
 act ; that morals rest not on divine codes, but on human 
 relations of all this there is never a hint in Sir Oliver's 
 cryptic explanation of the doctrine of the Fall. Job's 
 question, " Who is this that darkeneth counsel with 
 words?" rises to the lips as we close this unsatisfactory 
 book, and hence the warrant for application of the term 
 " obscurantist " to both writers. For in the degree that 
 they affirm the truth of the unproved, and assume that 
 on certain questions the canon is closed, they put a bar 
 upon inquiry, and encourage the ignorant and the timid, 
 the " light half-believers of our casual creeds," in lazy 
 acquiescence. 
 
 There is so much to admire in the character, so much 
 to imitate in the example, of Dr. Wallace, that animad- 
 version on the retrograde influence of his writings, in 
 the degree that they are speculative, is a thankless task. 
 It is among the romances of Science, like the inde- 
 
 1 Les Prophbtes, I, p. 233 (1876). 
 
i8 OBSCURANTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 
 
 pendent discovery of the planet Neptune by Adams and 
 Leverrier, that, when exploring in far-away Ternate, 
 Dr. Wallace should have hit on the identical solution of 
 the problem of the origin of species at which Darwin, 
 working in Cambridge, arrived. And it is to the 
 abiding honour of Dr. Wallace that Darwin's name 
 and fame were permitted to eclipse his own, the one 
 willingly yielding to the other the glory of carrying on 
 a work which culminated in the publication of the Origin 
 of Species. For, as Professor Baldwin says in his 
 Darwin and the Humanities, "the Darwinian theory 
 might with entire appropriateness have been called 
 Wallaceism." And the Professor fitly dedicates that 
 book to " Alfred Russel Wallace, because, like that of 
 his co-worker, his interest extends to all the humanities. " 
 It may be said with truth that his interest is the wider 
 of the two. For throughout his long and strenuous 
 career Dr. Wallace has fought unwearyingly for the 
 betterment of the conditions of " the poor also and him 
 that hath no helper." Social and economic questions 
 have largely occupied his pen and time, and if in his 
 latest book his optimism shows itself in the conviction 
 that this is the best of all possible worlds, there are 
 passages in it born of a burning indignation at man's 
 misdeeds towards his fellow-man which arrest approach 
 to the noble ideals in whose ultimate fulfilment Dr. 
 Wallace has a faith that we fain would share. Nor has 
 he ever concealed his rejection of current creeds as 
 having no correspondence to realities, and hence has 
 been under neither obligation nor inclination to attempt 
 to square the Christian scheme with the doctrine of 
 evolution. Therefore, the deeper is the regret that, in 
 the strange obsession of a mind so richly endowed, 
 there should be fostered the one heresy with which 
 science can make no terms the denial of the unity and 
 unbroken continuity of the totality of phenomena, both 
 psychical and physical. Such deviations from the 
 
OBSCURANTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 19 
 
 normal have value as supplying data for the science of 
 mental pathology. 
 
 It must be reluctantly admitted that when Sir Oliver 
 Lodge leaves the domain of physics, wherein he is a 
 deservedly supreme authority, for that of theology, he 
 passes to a lower plane. He is by far the greater 
 obscurantist of the two, because he bewilders most where 
 he should be most enlightening. His shambling, 
 hesitating gait makes him no sure-footed guide for the 
 plain wayfarer to follow. He wrests their old, straight- 
 forward connotation from such terms as " revelation," 
 " inspiration," " incarnation," so that, meaning any thing, 
 they may mean everything. In an Address to the Society 
 for Psychical Research(Proceedings, Partxxvi,pp. 14-15), 
 Sir Oliver said that in dealing with psychical pheno- 
 mena a hazy state of mind is better than a mind " keenly 
 awake " and " on the spot," and one has the feeling that 
 this sort of self-hypnotizing process has affected much 
 that he has to say about questions which need the 
 exercise of all our wits to grapple with. 
 
 But whether it be his Reason and Belief, or Dr. 
 Wallace's World of Life, their radical defect is the 
 assumption that certitude about the significance of the 
 universe has been reached. Quoting Plotinus, Sir 
 Oliver calls him " the inspired," and in his suggestive 
 little essay on the Inner Beauty Maeterlinck says : " Of 
 all the intellects known to me that of Plotinus draws the 
 nearest to the divine. " Their united tribute calls to mind 
 a sentence from that philosopher which Sir Oliver and 
 Dr. Wallace, and all of us, may take to heart : " If a 
 man were to inquire of Nature the reason of her creative 
 authority, she would say, Ask me not, but understand 
 in silence." 
 
 NOTE. A recent example of the disastrous influence of the 
 pseudo-scientific on the poetic temperament is supplied by 
 
/. : '.*; $!*)*: : : ,\ 
 20 OBSCURANTISM IN MODERN SCIENCE 
 
 Mr. Edward Carpenter, who, in his Drama of Love and Death, 
 says that " the evidence for the genuineness of some such 
 1 spirit ' photographs is to anyone who really studies it 
 
 beyond question" (p. 186) "Similarly with the wraiths or 
 
 phantoms which are projected from dying or lately dead 
 persons, the evidence for them in general is much too 
 abundant and well-attested to allow of disbelief" (p. 148). 
 " Meanwhile, it is interesting to find, in corroboration of the 
 general theory, that some experiments lately carried out, in 
 weighing the body before and after death, have apparently 
 yielded the result of a decided loss of weight at, or very 
 shortly after, the moment of death. Dr. Duncan McDougall, 
 experimenting with considerable care, found that one of his 
 patients lost three-quarters of an ounce precisely at death ; 
 another lost half an ounce, with an additional loss of one 
 ounce during the next few minutes, after which no further 
 loss took place " (p. 184). 
 
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